He's become the face of moderate Islam - but who is the real Waleed Aly?

But as the 37-year-old's prominence continues to rise as a well-recognised face of Australian Muslims, who exactly is Waleed Aly and what does he stand for?

The Project host, whose parents Moneim and Salwa emigrated to Australia from Egypt before meeting and getting married, was raised in Vermont in Melbourne's eastern suburbs with his older brother Ahmad.

He attended Wesley College and grew up playing cricket and football with the encouragement of his parents who were keen to make sure he would not become an outcast in Australia. 

Aly became a fan of the AFL and is still an avid Richmond Football Club supporter to this day.

As a 20-year-old, Aly went to Egypt and it was then he really started to embrace his religion.

In an interview for Enough Rope with Andrew Denton in August 2008, Aly said there were parts of his childhood that he ignored being Muslim because it was something he could avoid in Australia if he wanted to.

But he reached a level of 'religious consciousness' in Egypt and on his return to Melbourne got involved with what he described as a fundamentalist way of thinking. 

'... all that was really being offered was a brand of Islam that I think really did inculcate a kind of fundamentalist outlook - a kind of thing that was about purity to the exclusion of everyone else who is by definition then impure,' he said.

'When I think about fundamentalism, it's a term I hate because it's so misused, so when I use it I try to define it and what I mean by that is a belief in the inherency of your own self.' 

Aly said he started preaching in Melbourne like many others who followed a similar fundamentalist kind of path and admitted that in a lot of cases it was a form of youth rebellion against parents.

'I was never in anything that was remotely violent, for us it was all about preaching,' he said.

'It's funny, we didn't seem to think that people would need to like us. We just kind of figured that we could go out there and yell at people and then they'd suddenly see the light and think wow, you guys are great.'

He grew out of the phase and said most often people do when they realise it doesn't fit with going to university, getting a job or starting a family.

Aly got degrees in engineering and law at Melbourne University and became an executive member of the Islamic Council of Victoria for four years. 

He still often attends their mosque in Melbourne's CBD. 

The lawyer-turned-journalist started his own family after marrying his wife Susan Carland in 2002.

Ms Carland, who was raised as a Christian, converted to Islam when she was 19 years old before meeting her future husband.

She had decided at the age of 17, while still involved with a Baptist church, to start investigating other religions.

'I started to think 'why do I believe what I do?' Is it because I think it's true or is it because that's what I've been raised as. So I decided to look at other religions and no religion to see what made sense to me,' she told Channel 10.

'When I stumbled across information about Islam, it surprisingly made a lot of sense to me.' 

She faced backlash from her family and her conversions caused a rift with her mother, she said in an interview with Muslim Village, but she has since mended her relationship with her. 

During that time, her mother even told her she'd rather her marry a drug dealer than a Muslim.

The couple met soon after Ms Carland converted when a friend introduced them but she reportedly told him at the time 'I wouldn't marry you if you were the last man on Earth'.

She then got back in touch with him after a few years after realising she was comparing every man she met to Aly.

They married in Melbourne in 2002 and still live in suburbia with their two young children.

Both Aly and Ms Carland have found themselves in the public eye when it comes to Muslims in Australia - and with that comes scrutiny.

The couple have been targeted by parts of the Muslim community in the past for not accurately representing the variety Muslim experiences and have been subjected to hate mail from people who don't agree with their opinions. 

But Nail Aykan, the executive director of the Islamic Council of Victoria, says Aly is not just a voice of reason for Muslims but all Australians.

'The fact he is a Muslim is an added bonus. You could say he is a favourite son of the Muslim community,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

As the host of The Project and a Fairfax Media columnist, Aly speaks out regularly on social issues from Islam, the importance of same-sex marriage and seriousness of domestic violence.

Aly's televised plea for unity on Monday in the wake of the Paris terror attacks quickly went viral after he said hate will serve only to help Islamic State.

'There is a reason ISIL still want to appear so powerful, why they don't want to acknowledge that the land they control has been taken from weak enemies, that they are pinned down by air strikes or that just last weekend they lost a significant part of their territory,' he said on The Project. 

'ISIL don't want you to know they would quickly be crushed if they ever faced a proper Army on a battlefield.

'They want you to fear them. They want you to get angry. They want all of us to become hostile and here is why: ISIL's strategy is to split the world into two camps. It is that black and white. Again we know this because they told us.' 

He even went as far as singling out One Nation party leader Pauline Hanson and claiming she was helping ISIS for being outspoken over the potential threat of jihadists in Australia.

As a well known sociologist and academic, Ms Carland is also regularly called on by the media to discuss the links between Islam and feminism.

Of the Paris attacks, Ms Carland said it was crucial to recognise the difference between Islam and violent extremism.

'ISIS are no friends to Muslim, by any stretch of the imagination, and so it's really important that we never fall into the trap of thinking this is about Muslims against other people or anything like this,' she told Studio 10.

 

(dailymail.co.uk)